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‘My corner of the world’ 1

‘My corner of the world’:

Bachelard and Bondi Beach

Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe

School of Social Sciences and International Studies

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

Australia

[email protected]

[email protected]

Biographical Details

The authors teach and write together in the School of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052. They have written four books collaboratively: Passionate sociology; The mystery of everyday life; The first year experience; and Teachers who change lives. Additionally, Ann is co-author of Gender at work and author of Undoing the social, and Andrew is author of For freedom and dignity. They are currently working on a study of everyday ritual practice.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Belinda Clayton and Luca De Francesco for their assistance in

undertaking this research. We would also like to thank Jon, Katrina and Michael, as

well as all the other people whom we interviewed. This research was supported by a

grant from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South

Wales. The funding source had no involvement in the production of the article. We

received ethics approval from a UNSW Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]




Abstract:

Bachelard’s concept of lived space makes a significant contribution to an

understanding of the connections between emotion and space. We argue that it

provides a relational alternative to the common understanding of space as Euclidean,

as an empty, inert distance that gains life only through the projections of human

subjects. Bachelard gives primacy to a living space that is simultaneously inside and

outside, insisting that the life of this space is in a non- locatable relation. In doing so,

Bachelard also gives primacy to deep or archetypal emotions that come not from the

subject but from living space. We develop our understanding of lived space through

an analysis of people’s experiences of Bondi Beach in Sydney. Drawing out the

implications of our interviewees’ experiences of connectedness, we show that the

inhabitation of a corner or particular place opens to the whole.

Keywords:

lived space, Bachelard, depth, elemental, Bondi beach, immemorial




We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space, … how we take

root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’. (Bachelard 1969: 4)

The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door. It will serve as an

illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside (Bachelard 1969: 137)

In this article we develop an understanding of Gaston Bachelard’s concept of lived

space, a concept that makes a significant contribution to an understanding of the

connections between emotion and space. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard talks of the

importance of ‘felicitous space’, (1969: xxxi), of lived space that is ‘embracing and

embraced’ (1969: 8), of space that is ‘enclosed, protected… all warm’, the space of

‘earthly paradise’ (1969: 7). As these emotional descriptions of space suggest,

Bachelard is saying that lived space is a space that lives and feels. This raises two


questions. Where is emotion? What is distinctive about emotional states associated

with lived space?

It is commonly assumed that lived space gains emotional qualities through the lives of

human subjects: space is felicitous, for example, because it is occupied by happy

subjects or because it reminds subjects of their happy experiences. While Bachelard is

usually read as human-centred and nostalgic ( Lefebvre 1991: 120ff; Mugerauer 1994:

96; Ockman 1998; Ehrmann 1966; Moore 2000), we believe that he has a major

contribution to make to social theory precisely because he challenges humanism, by

giving logical primacy to relation. The significance of The Poetics of Space lies in the

phenomenological way that it brings ontological, spatial and temporal issues together:

different forms of being imply different forms of space and time. More specifically,

the primacy that Bachelard gives to lived space is a primacy of relation rather than the

subject: Bachelard’s major contribution to social theory is his claim that the life-form

that is felicitous cannot be defined or identified as a subject or a human (see eg 1969:

xxv-xxvi).

We will argue that Bachelard’s understanding of lived space provides a relational

alternative to the common understanding of space as Euclidean, as an empty, inert

distance that gains life only through the projections of human subjects. While

Euclidean space is characterized by boundaries between insides and outsides,


Bachelard gives primacy to a living space that is simultaneously inside and outside.

Thus he says of lived spaces: ‘they are in us as much as we are in them’ (1969: xxxiii).

In other words, he is insisting on the importance of a form of life that is not finite and

therefore cannot be defined. This is what he means by the phrase ‘[w]ithin the being,

in the being of within’ (1969: 7). The felicity of ‘felicitous space’, then, is not an external

projection of internal emotions of a subject, but comes, instead, from a relation where

there are no definable insides and outsides. In other words, lived and living space is

relation.

We will develop our understanding of Bachelard’s lived and living space through an

analysis of people’s experiences of Bondi Beach in Sydney. We have conducted

research to find out why, all year round, people engage in routine morning

recreational activities, such as soft-sand walking and running, cliff-path running,

swimming across the bay, yoga, body and board surfing. Many of our interviewees

spoke in Bachelardian terms of how, through their everyday practice, they ‘inhabit’

Bondi. They spoke of Bondi as their corner of the world, and of their favourite part

of the beach as their ‘corner of that corner’. When Bachelard speaks of corners being

‘part walls, part door’, he is referring to the relational logic of being at once inside and

outside, simultaneously protected and open: when we are ‘at home’, in our corner of

the world, we are in the world as the world is in us. Perhaps the most common theme


that arose in our interviews, this points to the significance of relational forms of

being: the ‘we’ here does not refer to subjecthood, but, rather, to a relational state.

This article will draw out the implications of our interviewees’ experiences of relation

and connectedness, showing how the inhabitation of a particular place opens to the

whole, ‘the cosmos’ (Bachelard 1969: 38-73). It is everyday recreation that takes them

out of their subjective and human-centred emotional states into the spatial-temporal

depths of the relational state of ‘well-being’ (Bachelard 1969: 12).

Bachelard: lived and living space

Gaston Bachelard was one of the leading philosophers of science of the twentieth

century, a major influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Kuhn, Serres, Althusser and

Derrida. In the second half of his career, he moved from a rationalist to a

phenomenological approach (Bachelard: 1969: xi-xii), writing books on the elements,

reverie and space. We find endless stimulation in The Poetics of Space, but it is a book

that receives little academic attention these days, possibly because abstract argument

has come to dominate social theory. Bachelard’s phenomenological challenge to

abstraction is one of the characteristics that makes his work so important. His focus


on lived and living space provides a theory and methodology for a participatory

understanding of the world.

In setting out a phenomenological approach to space, Bachelard distinguishes abstract

space from lived space, each of which corresponds to different ways of knowing the

world. Abstract or Euclidean space is produced by a thinking subject who has been

distanced from the world by their desire to know it as an object. In this form of

knowing, there is an opposition between the inside of a knowing subject and the

outside of the world: ‘[The obvious geometry of outside and inside] has the sharpness

of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything’ (Bachelard 1969: 211).

Oppositional thinking understands space as the abstract separation of self and other.

As a denial of connection, such space is a void, inert and empty. Whether the

measurable distance of this space be great or small, it retains the quality of absolute

distance.

Ontologically, abstract space is associated with bounded subjects and objects. In their

desire for self-certainty, subjects, according to Bachelard, are not receptive to the

world (1969: xi), but, rather, treat it as a mirror of their own selves. As there is no rest

in a desire to know, to assimilate the external other, Hegelian philosophers can never

be at home:


There is no dearth of abstract, ‘world-conscious’ philosophers who discover a

universe by means of the dialectical game of the I and the non-I. In fact, they

know the universe before they know the house, the far horizon before the

resting place; whereas the real beginnings of images, if we study them

phenomenologically, will give concrete evidence of the values of inhabited space

(Bachelard 1969: 4-5)

Bachelard is suggesting that, in their academic sophistication, abstract theorists are

alienated from the particularity of otherness, which is present in the everyday world to

hand.

As Bachelard says, lived or inhabited space, in contrast to abstract space, is known

phenomenologically, through participation in or inhabitation of the world. The site of

knowing is not a subject, but a living and embodied relation with the world:

knowledge is of and not about the world (see also Merleau-Ponty 1962: vii-xxi). The

ontological state of this form of knowing involves receptivity, loss of self-

preoccupation, and a patience or tranquility that comes with the suspension of the

desire to know or to get to a point of arrival. In Berger’s phrase, Bachelard offers a

peasant philosophy (1991: 83).


In the emotional state of ‘tranquility’, Bachelard says, the being ‘opens himself to the

world, and the world opens itself to him’ (1971: 173). He describes this ontologically

open state as eternal childhood, which involves not a nostalgic repetition of the

subject’s emotional past, not a regression to a childish way of knowing, but a capacity

to live the archetypal child, ‘under the sign of wonder’ (1971: 127). The archetypal

child does not refer to the biography of a subject, but rather to a relational form of

being lived in the immemorial (see eg 1969: 13-16). In this state of eternal childhood,

knowing is accompanied by a non-knowing, which, Bachelard says, is not ignorance

but a primal capacity for creativity (1969: xxviii-xxix).

For Bachelard, the phenomenological way of knowing involves creative imagination.

The term imagination does not refer to an activity of a thinking subject, but, rather, to

an embodied relational state of openness. It is through imagination that we live space,

a space which, in contrast to the void of abstract space, is a no-thingness full of

possibilities. This is why, for example, Bachelard speaks of the ‘fullness of the house’s

being’ (1969: 8). As this formulation implies, creative potential is not locatable; it only

exists when and because the house’s potential is found in the imagination’s being, and

imagination’s potential is found in the house’s being. By imagining houses and rooms

and drawers, we abide within ourselves: the house image becomes the topography of

our intimate being (1969: 8, 15).


A major point of this article is to place the archetypal at the centre of understandings

of Bachelard. It is the archetypal that distinguishes Bachelard’s phenomenology, and

yet this is almost completely overlooked in accounts of his work (Casey 1979; Kaplan

1972; Ehrmann 1966; Ockman 1998; Lefebvre 1991; Mugerauer 1994). These

accounts commonly assume that the memories associated with the house are, for

Bachelard, the memories of a subject, existing in chronological time. Thus, for

example, Kaplan describes Bachelard’s work as ‘subjective and personal’ (1972: 1);

Casey (1979: 185) and Moore (2000 ) describe it as romantic; Lefebvre says that

Bachelard posits a ‘relationship between Home and Ego [that] … borders on identity’

(1991: 121); and Ockman condescendingly says that Bachelard’s ‘well-known vision of

the oneiric house, with its rather nostalgic and essentialist world view, comes across as

historically dated’ (1998: 1). Because these writers read Bachelard through a subject-

centred ontology, they presume that his house is simply a subject’s refuge from the

world, filled with memories of the past. Bachelard’s theoretical challenge, however, is

only apparent when we realize that he is emphasizing the immemorial , based on a logic

that is neither subjective nor chronological.

Bachelard centres his discussion of lived space on the house because it is the house

that allows the receptive non-subjective state that imagination and phenomenology

require. The house is any intimate space experienced as ‘a corner of the world’. As we

have seen, it is an intimate entwinement of house-and-human, rather than a container


that holds a person as a box holds a piece of chalk. The intimate, then, is not simply

an inside for Bachelard; whereas logicians treat the inside as the exclusion of the

outside, for Bachelard, intimate space is both inside and outside. Moreover, since

inhabitation is a relation, involving the suspension of boundary and location, it is an

intimacy that is boundless or infinite. Holding us open, ‘the house’ - which could be a

house or a room or, just as easily, a garden or a beach - is simultaneously

containment-and-openness (see also Merleau-Ponty 1968 and Winnicott 1991). The

emotions we associate with houses – well-being, felicity, tranquility, love – are

qualities of relation, of living space, and not emotions of a subject. As Bachelard says

of ‘spaces of intimacy’, ‘[t]heir being is well-being’ (1969: 12).

Given Bachelard’s understanding of intimate space, it is not surprising that he focuses

on the door as the embodiment of the principle of containment-and-openness. While

walls and doors presuppose one another, the door is logically primary because it

embodies connection, the relational logic of ‘and’ rather than the ‘or’ of binary

opposition. The wall’s presumption of absolute separation is secondary, logically

derived from the door, which both closes and opens, both separates and connects. The

door, says Bachelard, ‘is an entire cosmos of the Half-open’ (Bachelard 1969: 222; cf

Simmel 1994; Metcalfe and Ferguson 2001: 240-261). The same principle underlies

Bachelard’s claim that the house is a corner, part wall, part door. Bachelard’s

argument has important implications for how we understand experiences of


difference. In abstract space and abstract social theory, difference is presumed to be at

a distance (‘the far horizon’), but in lived space and phenomenology, difference is

present in the openness and wonder of here, in the corner. The corner is the door to

the world. Here, which cannot be located in abstract space, is everywhere and

nowhere. Here, we are connected with the cosmos, with the spatial and temporal

depth of being.

Bondi, Jon, Katrina and Michael

Bachelard’s phenomenological methodology has significant implications for empirical

research. His method involves remaining with the vital details of particular

experiences or images in order to allow readers to imagine the experiences, that is, to

live, embody them (1969: xii-xxxv). It is important to note that this does not involve

an identification between writer and reader, as Ehrmann presumes when he says that

Bachelard ‘supposes a pure adherence or a complete fusion of one subjectivity (the

reader’s) to another (the poet’s)’ (1966: 577). Rather than identification between writer

and reader, Bachelard’s method involves a meeting in the non-finite realm of the

archetypal, where there is difference that cannot be located inside or outside.


Empirical material adduced by Bachelard is not used to re-present subjective

experience or to provide data from which abstract generalisations can be drawn.

Rather, his approach is based on evocation: through bringing to life particular

experiences, it is possible to evoke the universal, the archetypal. He says

I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true – a voice so

remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear when we listen as far

back as memory reaches, on the very limits of memory, beyond memory

perhaps, in the field of the immemorial. (1969: 13)

Following Bachelard, then, our aim is to evoke lived experience in order to engage

archetypal imaginations of readers, including those whose experiences we are

imagining-living in our writing. (See Postscript, below, for an example of this

sonorous reverberation.)

Between April and September in 2009, we interviewed 30 people undertaking daily

exercise routines on Bondi Beach. They ranged in age from their 20s to their 80s. In

the interviews we asked open ended questions, encouraging people to take their time

and speak from lived experience. As word of our project spread, people began

approaching us, asking to be interviewed, eager for the opportunity to reflect on the

mysterious power of their beach experience. Given our methodological focus on the


particular, we will take three interviews in depth rather than present a survey of all

interviews. These three interviewees use examples and languages that we think would

reverberate for all the people to whom we spoke. We should point out, however, that

our interviewees are only one of the many diverse groups who use the beach, and the

analysis that we will give would not necessarily apply to other people on the beach.

Bondi Beach is, at seven kilometers distance, the closest ocean beach to the CBD of

Sydney, and has the oldest surf lifesaving club in the world. The surrounding area is

one of the most densely populated areas in Sydney, and this population is augmented

by a great number of tourists, drawn both to the beach and the social life. Facing

south-easterly, toward the Tasman Sea and the immense expanse of the Pacific

Ocean, the beach consists of a kilometer long crescent of golden sand between two

rocky headlands. This shape and aspect give it consistently good surf. Simultaneously

held within its headlands and exposed by them to the fast changing power of the

elements, Bondi is renowned for the way in which it combines the domesticated with

the wild (see eg Game, 1991: 166ff). Every year hundreds of people have to be saved

from drowning at Bondi, because they have misread the dangers of the surf, and, at

the time of our interviews, there had recently been a heavily-publicised series of shark

alarms and attacks. Every experienced Bondi swimmer and surfer has a story of

coming close to death in the waters they love.


The first of our interviewees is Jon, who, in his 50s, works for the fire-brigade. He has

been soft sand running for over 35 years, and currently does this every day of the year.

He follows his run with a swim, after which he often sits in his corner of the beach

and does a crossword or reads a book. Jon is well-known to everyone who frequents

the beach, and his running is often punctuated with short stops as he shares greetings

with others. Sometimes people run with him for a lap or two, but his favourite part of

running is the experience of being ‘in [his] own zone’.

Katrina, our second interviewee, is a hospital doctor in her 20s. Since she moved to

Bondi two years ago, she has run almost every day along the cliff-face path that

connects Bondi to beaches to the south. She also has a swim and does some exercises

at the outdoor gym that she jokingly calls the ‘muscle park’. She prefers doing her

routine in the morning, but, when shift work doesn’t allow this, she finds that other

times have their own pleasures:

This place has its different moods through the day and in the evening everyone

has finished their day at work and they are mellow and it is lovely. Families are

out and going for walks, and the quality of the light changes, and those flats

there, they all light up, and the moon is up, and it is just beautiful.


Our final interviewee is Michael, a semi-retired landscape gardener in his 50s. Michael

grew up around Bondi, and lives there again now, but he visited the beach every day

even when living elsewhere. When he worked full-time, he maintained an afternoon

routine, but now he has a morning practice which involves stretching exercises, soft

sand running or walking, and swimming from the north to the south end of the

beach. In the middle of the beach he finds he can also sing at full voice, without

inhibition. Sometimes these days his wife and 23 year old daughter come down too,

and do their own routines.

The Lived Experience of Bondi

In one sense, people are very clear about why they undertake everyday exercise

routines on the beach: they want to be fit and healthy. However, all of them say that

there is something more that brings them to the beach, something which they cannot

quite name or explain to outsiders. Jon says:

Over the years my approach has become more holistic and that is the word

everyone wants to use now. Look, the exercise is still the prime motive that gets

me down here to start; I think that I’d better go down and have my run.

Invariably I’ll come down at eight and all of a sudden it is twelve or one o’clock


and I think, ‘What happened to the day?’ It just goes! I’m astounded whenever I

pick up my watch and have a look. Time just floats away down here. And you

know when the sun’s in a certain place, and you just get a feeling that it’s time to

go. I’m not bound by the clock here and maybe that is part of the attraction.

As Jon suggests, people have projects that motivate them to go to the beach, but what

is important about Bondi is what happens to them at the beach that they did not

intend. If their practice involved only the attainment of expected outcomes it would

have a serial, predictable quality to it. Yet, when Jon says that measurable time ‘floats

away’, he is pointing to something other than seriality. As an attunement to the sun’s

daily changes, his experience of time becomes more elemental, and this, he suggests,

might be ‘part of the attraction’. Confirming this intuition, Jon, like many others,

insists that his daily experience is always new and surprising: ‘I’d just like to say again

that I’ve never got bored with it and that’s what’s amazing.’ Jon is amazed at his

experience of amazement: he comes down with certain intentions, and, to his

amazement, he finds something else, every day. Jon’s practice, then, is paradoxically

routine and not routine; it is the way of ensuring that he is open to the newness of

each day. Rather than the routine and the exceptional being polar opposites, they are,

for Jon, intertwined (cf Buber 2002: 53-5; Metcalfe and Game, 2004, 2010).

Katrina speaks of her practice in similar terms:


I’m not somebody who has to do it like you have to tick a box, like when you

start the day brushing your teeth; you go if you want and you just find that nearly

every day you want to go.

When we asked her how she felt if she missed a session, her response was:

Um, miss a session, well I don’t like to call it a session … I don’t get to the stage

where my hands start to shake but I do notice if it has been a few days and then

when you do come down, it is like you are discovering it again and it is, ‘Oh, oh,

oh: that’s right!’ and you see little things you’ve missed, and you say, ‘Oh, hello

you’, and you just get totally struck by the beauty of it. I don’t know how you

can separate the physical exercise and the spiritual aspect, if you want to call it

that. It is much more than exercise. I can’t imagine getting a similar feeling

running on a gym treadmill for 40 minutes. You need to live in the time that you

are at, in the place where you are, and let yourself do that, let go a bit. I think

that when people come down every day something happens every now and again

that breaks through complacency, because we are lucky to live in this great place.

Katrina rejects the word ‘session’ because it implies that her experience of Bondi is

simply a means to her ends; you pay for sessions in a gym to attain your goals, but you

go to Bondi to be in Bondi, to ‘let go a bit’ and allow yourself to be changed in ways


that surprise you, again and again. In other words, something other and more than

intentions is involved in getting people to the beach.

Jon and Katrina are pointing to a transformation, an ontological change from being

an intentional, project-driven subject, located in abstract space-time, to a relational

state of being in lived, ‘inhabited’, space-time. This is a change to the being of

‘felicitious space’. Many of our interviewees described this state, as Bachelard does, as a

state of well-being. This suggests that when they spoke about fitness, they were not

just referring to their individual strength, but to a fitness that comes from being in,

from relationally fitting in, a space that is both within and without (Bachelard 1969: 7).

This is what Jon has in mind when he calls his practice holistic and what Katrina

implies when she says that the physical and spiritual are inseparable. Likewise, when

Michael uses the common expression ‘Dr Bondi’, and when others say that Bondi has

saved their lives, they are referring to health in the full sense of the term, a being

whole through being part of a whole (see Bateson 1972).

In order to develop an understanding of this transformation, we will start with the

experience that many describe as ‘putting things in perspective’. Jon uses this phrase

at several points in his interview. He says:


If you sit in your own home you just get so introspective and it is so narrow a

vision, ‘Geez, I’ve got to pay those bills’ or I have a problem with the family.

Coming down here puts it into perspective and you deal with it better when you

leave here. …

It just takes your mind off whatever, you know if your foot’s sore or you’re

wondering what you are doing here on this cold miserable day. I just relax. It is a

very good way to put things back into perspective. You realise that this place and

these rocks are going to be here a long time after I’m gone and it will still be here

a long time after my great grandchildren will be gone and it is a humbling sort of

experience. It just makes you realise that things are not so important.

I guess that’s it in a nutshell: to put things into perspective, just to get you back

to nature a bit. In the city, with all the cars and noise, you’re not even sure which

way the wind’s blowing, so it is just good to come down here.

Jon makes a distinction between ‘perspective’ and being ‘introspective’, a self-

conscious state in which he is identifies with a sore foot or personal problems or

things that have to be done. The latter state is often thought of as reality but, as Jon

suggests, it involves a failure to see what is actually present. If, for example, Jon is

focused on his sore foot while running, he is distanced from where he is: his


identification with this obstacle to his projects makes him a separate subject, located

and bounded in abstract space. Such a being can only see their life in terms of

obstacles and goals, failure and success. In their ‘narrow vision’, they are so focused

on a projection of who they should be that they cannot appreciate the wholeness of

their lives as they are.

People use the expression ‘getting things in perspective’ to describe the realisation that

they are really here, at the beach, that this is reality and that the things they may have

been worried about were projections. Perspective comes when they have, as Katrina

says, ‘let go’ of their narrowing identifications, and found their whole being in the

present. This letting go happens without it being made to happen by a subject; it is

not the outcome of a choice to let go. Jon told us that the moment of ‘getting things

in perspective’ happens when he becomes aware of the obsessive aspect of, for

example, his anxiety about his foot. As the realization occurs to him, and he sees the

obsessiveness for what it is, the anxiety loses the grip it has had on his vision. Letting

go is not a rejection or denial of particular subjective emotional states but is an

openness to all possibilities; when people have let go, they feel at home, open-and-

closed, at home with their whole being. This is the non-subjective emotional state of

tranquility or well-being.


The meaning of perspective changes, then, as the experience of space changes. When

people think about perspective in Euclidean or abstract terms, they are thinking of a

view from a fixed location, but when people on the beach use the term they are

referring to a connecting space-time where there are no locatable viewpoints. We can

see this when Jon talks about the rocks in his corner of the world that will be here

beyond the life of his great grandchildren. Because, as inhabited space, the rocks are

both inside and outside, Jon feels simultaneously transient and enduring. Within living

space-time, perspective is a vision from all angles, which means also from all times.

With perspective then, being is ‘humble’, no-thing and full, living in a here that is

nowhere and everywhere, and in a moment of presence that holds within it all time.

The question arises: how do people come into this connected state of inhabiting the

beach, if it is not willed and intended? The answer lies in their humble devotion to

daily practices. This is implied by Katrina when she says that ‘nearly every day’ she

‘finds’ that she ‘wants’ to go on her run. If Katrina finds her wants, they are not willed;

they are both inside and outside. They come to her, call to her, and yet she finds them

innermost. This is the relational, non-causal logic that Bachelard refers to as

reverberation (1969: xix). Like most people engaging in daily practices, Katrina is

called anew every day, and the call is not to an anticipated goal but to the practice for

itself. All our interviewees highlight this focus on the practice for itself, speaking of


how the disciplines of ritual still their anxieties and loosen their obsessive

identifications (see Bachelard 1969: xvii-xviii).

Michael gives a description of his experiences of coming into such a present and

focused state:

I think that like meditation it is about being able to lose yourself: the

conversation in your head stops for a little while and that can happen either by

being quite still or by having some bodily rhythm like swimming that just calms

the mind. A connection can take over just about anywhere but there is one

particular exercise where I close my eyes or follow my hand around and at some

point my tongue goes to the roof of my mouth and everything settles down.

Katrina implies that the discipline of her practice involves attention, at each footfall,

to where she is:

At this time of year, it is pitch black at the time I run, completely dark, and I go

for a run from Bondi up along the cliff path, which has a whole lot of steps.

After a while you know it so well that it doesn’t matter if it is dark: you know

where you have to duck your head because the cliff hangs over and you know

where the water washes over the path.


A lot of it is repetitive and that familiarity is part of the joy of it. You do the

same run and you find that your feet are going down in the same place, and you

sit for a rest and your hand goes down on the same rock and you say, ‘It is only

you and me’. After a while you start to develop a sacred site mentality: this is my

place. You feel like it owns you more than you own it.

Daily practices transform people, allowing them to inhabit this space-time where being

is. Thus, the joy of which Katrina speaks, is not an internal subjective state, but

emerges through the practice, running ‘the same run and finding that your feet are

going down in the same place’.

Because daily practice brings about a sense of lived, inhabited space, it makes Jon and

Katrina feel that Bondi is theirs. But this experience of belonging is quite distinct, our

interviewees told us, from the proprietorial sense of identifying with a place as a

possessive subject. Here is Katrina, suggesting how she slips between these different

senses of belonging and their different space-times:

You come to think of it as your backyard when you live nearby and you get

quite proprietorial about it. It’s disconcerting if you come down in the middle

of the day during summer and it is completely packed and you can’t recognise

it. But that is great as well. Anyone who lives in an area gets to know the little


tricks of it and starts to feel like they have more right to it than people who are

just passing through, but the visitors and tourists and backpackers contribute

so much to the energy of this place and we depend on them.

Proprietorship involves the desire to be left alone with the beach, to fence in what is

yours. Belonging in this sense is exclusive, a matter of subjects establishing a location

in abstract space-time by excluding others. By contrast, belonging in lived space-time,

we have seen, is an open relation, a connection.

From the perspective of the proprietor, it may seem that openness is a crowded

experience, but that is to think from Euclidean assumptions. In fact, both Bachelard

(see eg 1969: 9-10, 26, 32; 1971: 99-101) and our interviewees describe this state of

connected belonging as an experience of solitude. This alerts us to the difference

between an exclusive form of aloneness and an open form of solitude. Openness

brings solitude rather than crowdedness because there is no external entity to exclude,

because it is possible to be with an otherness that is at once inside and outside. We

think that this is the experience to which Katrina alludes with her example of the

rock. The solitary feeling that there is only the rock and her is part of her expansive

‘sacred site mentality’: she and the rock are nothing but connections to everything;

there are no things to be excluded. Such solitude is healing because it allows people to

be whole, to experience imaginative potential rather than to exclude elements of their


being that do not match their identities (see Merton 1972: 80-82; Winnicott 1990). As

Bachelard says, the imagination of solitude ‘binds’ the ‘cosmos’ (1971: 16, 177).

This analysis has led us to see that people appreciate their beach practices because

they feel revitalized by the connectedness and solitude they experience in living space.

This combination indicates that the community found in lived space-time has a

different emotional basis to the form of community found in abstract space-time. The

former is open, the latter jealous. To give a sense of the community of solitude, here

is Jon:

Sometimes when I’m in my own zone I’m really unaware of people, but mostly I

look up and someone will be there so I will go through three or four stops along

the beach. If that bothered me I’d know I’d become obsessional. Saying hello is

just a nice thing to do and it is part of being here. After my run I usually sit

alone, but there is still a social aspect to that. Occasionally I feel pressured to

speak to people but most of the time I don’t.

Jon describes a state of solitude in which he is open to his environment and others in

it. When he is ‘in [his] zone’, there is no internal chatter in his mind, and no sense of

performing for others, and in this present and focused state he doesn’t need to close

himself off from others. Accordingly, except for occasions when he has become


‘obsessional’, he doesn’t need to wrench himself from an exclusive place in order to

stop and say hello to others. When running, he feels that he is with others; when he

sits alone at the beach, he does so openly, without being self-conscious.

When Jon talks about saying hello, he is referring to a practice where people share ‘the

time of day’. ‘Beautiful day!’, someone might say, or ‘What a great wave!’, ‘God it’s

windy’, ‘Look at that amazing sunrise’, ‘Water’s cold today’. They may have also said

‘Beautiful day!’ yesterday, but, with each day’s difference, their remark comes from the

wonder of learning beauty anew (Bachelard 1969: xxv-xxix). All along the beach,

people are making the same comments as they greet friends and strangers alike.

Sometimes these comments might be perfunctory, but as people are usually not

‘pressured’ to speak, the greetings are usually lively, spontaneous and particular to the

moment. They are full of significance to the participants because, rather than coming

from or being directed to identified individuals, they come from the lived space-time

of Bondi; they are of the day and not about it because they come from the here and

now. The greeting says ‘Yes! This is it; this is where we are; this is life. Praise be!’.

Every day is experienced as unique, and the greeting witnesses that miracle. Moments

of greeting give people a sense of belonging because their solitude, their particularity

and wholeness, has been witnessed (Capra and Steindl-Rast 1992; Winnicott 1990).


These greetings bring us back to the question of why people come to the beach. We

said at the beginning of this section that there is something more than physical fitness

that brings people here, something that they cannot quite name. They cannot name

what is special because they do not have an objectifying distance from it; it is known

through participation in the life of the beach, an unnameable experience celebrated

and acknowledged in the greetings shared by people who share Bondi as a lived space-

time. As Bachelard says, what is communicated is the mystery, that which cannot be

defined or located: ‘All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is

secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively’ (1969: 13).

Depth of being

We have been arguing that people are called to the beach by an experience of

particularity-in-connectedness. In this section we will develop an understanding of the

quality of this connected particularity that makes it unidentifiable, unnameable. We

will argue that inhabitation of lived space-time is a door to a primal or archetypal

experience of life, life that is not definably human, much less that of a locatable

individual. Thus, for Bachelard, the connections that bring to life the particular have a

quality of spatial and temporal depth, and it is the primal nature of this experience of


connectedness that he has in mind when he gives logical primacy to lived space-time.

For Bachelard, the being of lived space-time is at once particular and whole, both here

and cosmic, both now and eternal: the cosmos, he says, is intimate (1969: 183ff).

To develop an understanding of depth of being, we need to recall that Bachelard’s

lived space is based on the principle of the door or the corner, the principle of

containment-and-openness. Our interviewees spoke of Bondi in these terms. Here is

Jon, talking about his corner:

It is such a beautiful spot here. Sometimes in winter, when there is a howling

westerly blowing of a morning, up in the south corner there it is beautiful and

sheltered. It is just a real nurturing feeling up there. You have the rocks

overhanging and there is a beautiful colour in the rocks; you can lay there and

just look at the patterns and the colour in the sandstone, and it is fascinating

when you consider how much colour is in them. It is quite a nurturing, safe

feeling.

And here is Michael, speaking of the beach as a corner:

The beach faces slightly south and is a little skewed. It’s got what for me are

encompassing arms of sandstone, so it is an embrace rather than, you know, the

extent of Manly [Beach], which doesn’t hold you the way that this does. There’s


also this sense of amphitheatre which is very comforting to me and my sense of

geography.

As we will see, when Michael talks about the skewed angle of the beach, he is

referring to its openness to ‘southerly busters’, gales that can blow up suddenly on any

day. Both he and Jon, therefore, are linking the nurturing embrace of Bondi with an

experience of openness, of exposure to the elements. The lived space of Bondi in

which they participate is both nurturing and elemental, and because the elements of

lived space are not external forces, Jon and Michael do not shelter from them, but

find themselves at home in and through them (see also Bachelard 1968, 1983, 1988).

Let us take Jon’s experience of the rocks as an example of this elemental intertwining.

When he talks about the colour and patterns of the sandstone, Jon is exemplifying the

imaginative process that Bachelard calls reverie or elemental dreaming (see eg 1971;

1969: 190-205; 1983, 1988). Lying under the rocks, looking up at them, Jon has lost

his sense of Euclidean space-time and has become part of the rocks. He is not a

subject looking at an external object, but has a sense of perspective that allows him to

see inside and outside at once. He looks at the surface of the rock as you might look

at a fractal image: where his eye is caught by one curve, it is led to see curves in the

curve, and curves within that. He sees into the stone, and in seeing the unfathomable

depths of the sandstone, his own surprising depths unfold (Bachelard 1969: 199-210,


see also Bohm 1985). Fascinated by the rock, Jon is lost, as a human or an individual

with purposes, and found, as soulful or imaginative being (see eg Bachelard 1969: xvi-

xviii, 17).

Although he is talking about rock, Jon’s reference to the swirling patterns acribes

sandstone the fluidity of water and flux of air. Looking at the colours and patterns

overhead, he is watching the clouds in the sky, and as he follows the rock patterns

inward, he too is floating. The shapes are now also what he sees below, on the ocean

floor, where the sand of sandstone is being laid in colours and patterns. Jon is

immersed in all the elements: this rock, built up over countless years under ocean

currents and then reshaped by the sun, wind and water; this rock, the cave where land,

water, wind and sun meet; this rock, which connects his and his great grandchildren’s

transience to the eternity of the elements. When Jon is present to this rock through

embodied imagination, he experiences the intertwinement of elemental being, the

connectedness across space and time that Bachelard calls depth.

It is worth pausing to highlight the spatio-temporal implications of this Bachelardian

analysis of the elemental. These elements are beyond Euclidean and causal logics of

space-time, for they are not finite or locatable. The westerly wind howling in Jon’s

face is also the wind roaring around the Antarctic, as well as being the sun, and ocean


currents and land masses everywhere. Michel Serres, who was Bachelard’s student,

puts it this way:

One element passes through others, and they, conversely, pass through it. It

supports and transports. These reciprocating fluidities create such perfect mixing

or kneading that few places lack at least some knowledge of the state of others.

… One breeze bears and announces the whole universe. (1995: 26-9; see also

Bachelard 1971: 179-181).

When Jon is in his corner, he is enlivened through his elemental connection, which, as

Serres says, connects him with the cosmos: here is the dry air of the desert, the biting

winds of the Antarctic.

We can now return to Jon’s motivations for coming to the beach. When he says that

his prime motive is exercise, he implies that there are also other factors involved.

Hinted at in his description of a time not governed by the clock, these other factors

emerge clearly when he speaks of the elements. At one point he says that the beach

calls city people because, otherwise, they don’t even know which way the wind is

blowing; elsewhere he says that ‘the water is the initial element that drags me’. It is

elemental being that calls him to the beach.


I love it, love it. I love the connection with the elements. I love running on a

stinking hot day; I don’t like the cold too much but if there is a lightning storm

around, it is fantastic: it just gives you so much energy to run. When I’m running,

I look at the water a lot and I watch the waves. I try to listen to it and focus on

it. Then when you finish running, and you dive into the water, there is this relief.

It is a real release. It is like a cleansing effect on your body and soul. You absorb

some of the minerals from the sea because your pores are open from the

sweating, and after being in the sea you get that ozone smell. So the swim is an

important part. An integral part.

For Jon, this elemental call is not, it should be noticed, a return to a chronological

past or to a state of bounded unity: the oceanic feeling that he describes is not the

same as Freud’s (1962: 11-13; see Game 2001: 238). Moreover, the cleansing water

does not separate Jon from the world, by washing anything away. Jon is instead

cleansed through openness: his pores are open, his being is open, to difference. He is

immersing himself in an ocean that is different every day, and that changes his being

in ways he cannot control. When he dives into the water every day, he experiences the

wonder of elemental no-thingness. Jon’s love of the elemental connection is a love

with no identifiable source and no identifiable object: the connection itself is love.


This elemental aspect to morning practices involves re-creation: every day people

experience the wonder of genesis. For Jon and Katrina, routine is not a mechanical

repetition of the past: through their practice, past, present and future co-exist in the

wonder of the unfolding now. Creation, in the eternal now, is not the beginning point

in chronology, and re-creation is not a repetition of this chronological past (see Eliade

1954); recreation is instead the particular which holds within it the whole of time. As

Bachelard says of the newness of creation,

Time is suspended. Time no longer has any yesterday and no longer any

tomorrow. Time is engulfed in the double depth of the dreamer and the world.

The World is so majestic that nothing any longer happens there; the World

reposes in its tranquility. (1971: 173; see also 1969: xii-xxxv.)

When Jon dives into the water, his experience of renewal is, as Bachelard would say, a

primal experience of temporal depth (see eg 1969: 32-3). Re-creation involves the

simultaneity of ‘this is new’ and ‘I have always known this’.

Bachelard claims that vital space necessarily has the archetypal or immemorial quality

of ‘I have always known this’, which involves something other and deeper than a

subject’s memory of a chronological past. This logic of depth is, in fact, the basis of

Bachelard’s phenomenology: phenomenological communication relies on evocation


rather than representation, and this in turn relies on connecting with the immemorial

or universal through the particularity of this experience (1969: 13). Thus, when people

on the beach cannot name the lived experiences they share in their greetings, it is

because these experiences bear the presence of the immemorial.

To conclude this article, then, we will consider the significance of the immemorial to

lived space-time. Here is Michael’s account of elemental being in Bondi.

I owe quite a bit of my love of Bondi Beach to my late mother, because I

would come down here with her when I was a small child. A southerly buster

would come in, a proper thunder and lightning afternoon or evening storm. We

might borrow a friend’s car and drive out to Ben Buckler [the northern Bondi

headland] and stand in the full force of the southerly, to experience the big

weather. And then we might go home and she would put Wagner on the old

gramophone and I would catch the mood and watch the Valkyries going round

the room at 78 revs per minute. That gave me the quality of enjoying physically

the weather. I’m happy whatever the weather really, but if it’s got a bit of an

edge to it, it answers to my spirit.

I like to dive off the rocks. We scattered my mum’s ashes off that north end

there. There are many many people who’ve done that, and I go out there some


mornings when there are still a few flowers left. So I can pay my respects to

mum. But even before she died I liked diving rather than wading into the water,

because it is much more exciting. The depth is maybe a little confronting but

not enough to stop me. Swimming [across the bay] is also nice as your goggles

are clear and just watching the bottom is really lovely. You can see little rays

and see the fish and if you swim in close enough on a not-too-big day, you can

see the swell of each wave move the sand around and you could be flying over

some sandy desert or something. It can take you to all of those places.

When Michael attributes his love of Bondi to his mother, he is remembering his

chronological past, his childhood experiences of Bondi with his mother. However, his

description of the wildness of those experiences suggests that something deeper than

memory is at work here, something more primal that connects Wagner and Bondi and

Michael and his mother and all mothers. His experiences on the rocks of North

Bondi, now and then, have the quality of the immemorial which, Bachelard says, is

essential to the inhabitation of space. In imagining-living space, ‘the daydream

deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens up for the dreamer of a

home beyond man’s earliest memory,’ and, in this process, ‘we travel to the land of

Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are’ (1969: 5-6; see

also 16, 33). Motionless refers to the timeless quality of archetypal or permanent

childhood, the open state that allows connection with the cosmos: ‘Without


childhood, there is no real cosmicity’ (Bachelard 1971: 126; see also Hillman 1975: 8-

12). Thus, the childhood that Michael is experiencing now is this permanent

childhood, beyond all ‘mirages of nostalgia’ (1971: 125), the childhood that gave and

gives him ‘the quality of enjoying physically the weather’.

If Michael is living permanent childhood, what does this suggest about his relation to

his mother? Let us recall his description of Bondi, his corner of the world: ‘The beach

faces slightly south and is a little skewed. It’s got what for me are encompassing arms

of sandstone, so it is an embrace’. The containment-and-openness of the beach could

be that of his mother, which suggests that here Michael connects with the

intertwinement of mother-and-Bondi. His mother is present here, now, embracing yet

open, opening him to the southerly busters and to the archetypal childhood that gives

him the capacity for elemental being. In experiencing the particularity of his mother

now, without nostalgia, Michael experiences not the Freudian but the archetypal

mother (Bachelard 1971: 125). Thus, just as Michael respects Bondi for its undefinable

depths, its ‘edge’, so he respects the mystery, the undefinability of his mother who is

eternally present in this edge. The love that Michael experiences is not simply a

subjective love for the objects of beach and mother; instead, this emotional state has

the spatial-temporal logic of depth: it is archetypal.


Michael’s respect is apparent in his practice of diving off the rocks into the depths.

With every repetition, he dives through his mother’s ashes and ‘pays his respects’ to

her. But, in doing this, he is repeating a ritual performed by many others, and is, in a

sense, paying his respects to all the others mourned at this site. Through his mother,

he connects with generations past and future who mourn, are mourned, throw

flowers, dive off these rocks. Like Jon, Michael dives into an ocean that is an other

world, different every day; and he sees this world as Jon sees his rock, not as an

object, but in its undefinable wonder. Michael glides over the rays as they glide

through the sand. In living space, he is ray, and ocean, and desert, and he is amazed,

because, as Bachelard would insist, he knows them already, in the immemorial. This

space, Michael says, ‘can take you to all of those places’.

It is the inhabitation of this corner of the world ‘day after day’ that allows Michael,

like our other interviewees, to experience this connected or relational form of being,

this tranquil and felicitous space. And it is this experience of no-thingness that

connects the thousand and one things of Michael’s busy day. His morning practice,

Michael told us, is ‘just part of the continuity of the day… just part of the flow of the

day’. As implied by the expression ‘getting things in perspective’, daily beach practices

connect people with the whole of their life.


Postscript

When we had completed the first draft of this article, we sent it to Jon, Katrina and

Michael, to check that we had not misinterpretted their accounts. Michael not only

reassured us, he responded to Bachelard in kind:

I think you have got the tone right, and to my ear the denizens of the beach do

a great job of translating the academic cadences of the Bachelardians into a

common tongue. … Your draft is a worthy attempt at setting out how a

routine run along the sand can be a pursuit of the ineffable. Each run is a

celebration, a repetition of one of the thousand names of God, who cannot be

captured by any collection of phrases; the words chasing after the mystery.

Drop down from the shoulder

slide across the glistening sinews

along the outstretched limb,

steepening across a forearm

gentling into an open palm.

On the other hand,

a wave raised up

with each knuckle closing


into a foaming fist

taking me down, upside down,

held down, dissolving.....

then released, lungs bursting

to gasp in light and air.

Buoyant again, swimming

between breath and death.


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